Hotal, also spelled as Hotel, is a 2014 Pakistanipsychological thriller film, written and directed by Khalid Hasan Khan. It is claimed to be Pakistan's first psycho-thriller feature film. It is also dubbed as the first Hindi feature film outside Bollywood. The film stars Meera, Humayun Gillani, Sadiq A. Khan, Neha Anil, Tariq Jamal, Baila Naz, Anees Raja, Nisa Jabie, Nasreen Jaan and Wiam Dahmani. The film was released on 13 May 2016. Upon release, it received overwhelming negative reviews from critics and was a box office failure. The same year, critic Omair Alavi added the film in his list of Top Worst Pakistani films of 2016.
Plot
The story resolves around an Indian girl Kashika who is expecting her first child. Kashika's husband Naresh wants to have a son while Kashika wishes to have a daughter. She stays in a hotel, on the advice of her doctor. There she meets her sister, who was never born. Mysterious and incredible events took place at the hotel, during which Kashika finds out the truth behind the whole scenario.
Omer Bashir of Dawn.com gave the film 2 out of 5 stars and wrote, In the end, while Hotal’s plot failed to connect on any emotional level, it raises important questions about our film industry, the mainly homogenous titles it brings forth and the lack of diversity in roles offered to female leads. Tanveer Khadim, blogger of The Express Tribune wrote, Hotal, the work of a New York Film Academy graduate, Khalid Hasan Khan, offered nothing surreal and nothing to write home about. She concluded her review with upshot, All in all, Hotal is a freaky product, not a spine-chilling psycho-thriller. Omair Alavi from HIPinPakistan.com also criticized the film's plot and stated, Hotal has all the ingredients of a psycho thriller except that the plot is beyond any logic whatsoever. He also disliked the film's music and commented, One cannot end the movie review without reflecting on the three items numbers – two songs and a dance sequence – that beat even the gandasa-endorsing cinema of the mid ’90s in vulgarity. It’s ironic that the Pakistani censor board didn't chop off these numbers, which were there only to add "colour" to the film. In his review on ‘Stupid Six’ Pakistani movies of 2016, Omair Alavi placed the film on second number.
